Reading Nonverbal Behaviour In Child Abuse Cases – How To Encourage Children To Divulge Information In Truth Telling
Christopher Philip
While this article and the research is focused on child abuse, it is of interest to anyone working with children as well as parents. You will gain incite into children’s nonverbal behaviour with respect to their desire to cooperate in truth telling as well as their desire to cooperate in general disclosure situations.
Priming The Research
Children suffering from abuse are often reluctant to speak about their own experiences and may even actively deny having been abused when asked. In fact, in over a third of cases, children fail to disclose abuse at all. Reasons for non-disclosure include fear, guild or shame as well as a desire to protect the perpetrators, especially parents or other close family members or family friends. However, it is crucial in such important instances for children to speak up so they can be helped.
Previous research has shown that when children do not disclose abuse, they are generally verbally uncooperative during interviews but little research has been conducted into the nonverbal cues that may predict abuse.
Studies have shown that older children are generally more forthcoming and that girls over boys tend to speak up. There is also a trend for disclosure to occur when children have informally disclosed or when evidence of abuse is apparent.
To encourage disclosure, professionals have developed non-suggestive interview techniques. It is agreed that when suggestive questions are posed, they can prime or lead children to produce false accusations. Regardless, accurate reporting is especially important and for this to occur best results come from open-ended free response questions.
However, results have shown that children still deny abuse when there is large evidence for its occurrence. In some cases lack of reporting reaches 50% despite strong evidence to the contrary.
Studies have found that females aged 11-25 who are reluctant to disclose sexual abuse tend to show more expressions of shame, while disclosers showed more expressions of disgust. The findings on children is mixed, and like adults show no readily discernable reliable cue of deception or truth telling. In some studies girls showed more sadness, while boys showed no emotion. Older children tend to stay on task and be attentive, but no major trend was found otherwise. Crying and negative affect was studied and the children alleging abuse were more upset than those not alleging abuse but no effect was consistent for gender or age.
The Current Study
In the current study a team of researchers led by Carmit Katza, Division of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK looked at the nonverbal behaviour of children for whom there was substantial evidence that abuse had occurred.
In the study the researchers looked at three key factors including: (1) differences between the nonverbal behaviors of disclosers and non-disclosers, (2) associations between nonverbal behavior early in the interviews and later disclosure/non-disclosure, and (3) changing patterns of nonverbal behavior across successive phases of the
interviews.
The researchers predicted that nonverbal behaviors including signs of stress, physical disengagement, and negative emotions would be found more in the non-disclosers than in the disclosers. They also predicted that disclosers and non-disclosers would differ most in the substantive phase (later phase or interrogation). They also predicted that abused children would display a greater variety of negative nonverbal behaviour and that they would increase as the interview progressed.
The sample involved 40 alleged victims of child abuse (15 girls and 25 boys). In all cases, 50% had admitted abuse, but there was external strong evidence that abuse had occurred in each case.
Videotaped interviews were used in which the interrogator built rapport in the first part with neutral questions and then progressed to more open ended questions to explore the ideas about abuse.
As part of the coding procedure, the tapes were examined for stress, physical disengagement, and emotions (positive and negative) as follows:
Stress
(1) Twitching – abrupt, distinct movements of any part of the body.
(2) Fidgeting – use of one or both hands to touch or manipulate any body part or object.
(3) Pulling hair
(4) Tapping – repetitive thumping movements of the hands/fingers and/or feet.
(5) Shifting position – changes in the sitting position or shifts of the upper torso in any direction.
(6) Biting/sucking/licking – any behaviors in which the tongue was seen, a body part or object was grasped in the teeth, or
the mouth deliberately touched a body part or object.
(7) Rigidity/tensing up – heightened muscle tension and the absence of physical movement.
(8) Self-soothing movements – deliberate and repetitive movements such as rocking or stroking.
Physical disengagement
(1) Shrinking – shortening or narrowing the body.
(2) Closing off – crossing arms and/or legs.
(3) Looking away – not looking at the interviewer for more than 4 seconds.
(4) Covering – hiding any part of the face or head.
(5) Getting up – completely or partially leaving the seat.
(6) Turning away – moving the child’s entire upper torso away from the interviewer.
Emotions: facial displays of negative emotions
(1) Anger
(2) Fear
(3) Sadness
(4) Shame
(5) Disgust
Emotions: facial displays of positive emotions
(1) Smiling/laughter
(2) Happiness
The Results
Results showed that many of the negative nonverbal behaviours seldom occurred. Thus, results were lumped together.
Most of the nonverbal cues consisted of displaying stress while positive emotions were least common. Children in the non-disclosure group showing proportionately more physical disengagement than children in the disclosure group. Also, physical disengagement was more prominent in the rapport-building phase and in the substantive phase than in the introduction. As the interview progressed stress and physical disengagement became more prominent while positive emotions became less prominent. The non-disclosure group was more disengaged physically than the disclosure group.
Drawing Conclusions
Children who are unwilling to disclose show higher rates of stress and most prominently physical disengagement including shrinking, closing off the body, looking away, covering part of the face or head, getting up and turning away. In other words, children who are unwilling to cooperate and show avoidance behaviours are unlikely to divulge likely abuse.
This is consistent with other studies showing that children also verbally disengage when they are unwilling to divulge.
It is also interesting that early disengagement was a predictor of overall reluctance to divulge. In cases where verbal disengagement was studied, it was found to only be predictive later in the interview process, meaning that children will generally cooperate verbally in the early part of the interview, but will remain consistently disengaged physically if they are unwilling to divulge.
Being observant of early physical disengagement is crucial to detecting the likelihood to divulge abuse. These cues give the interviewer signals that they may need to build more rapport before proceeding.
Overall stress was not a good predictor of disclosure or non disclosure, but it did increase over the interview process suggesting that the overall process is stressful.
The children who had allegedly experienced sexual abuse appeared more stressed than those suffering physical abuse suggesting that sexual abuse might be more difficult for children to discuss than physical abuse. Stress was also less prevalent among the older children than the younger children suggesting that older children are better at masking negative emotions than younger children.
Facial expressions did not predict disclosure rates indicating that these may be more easily controlled than bodily expressions.
Image Credit: jintae kim
Resources
Katza, Carmit; Irit Hershkowitz; Lindsay C. Malloya; Michael E. Lamba; Armita Atabakia and Sabine Spindlera. Non-Verbal Behavior of Children Who Disclose or do not Disclose Child Abuse in Investigative Interviews. Child Abuse & Neglect. 2019. 36: 12-20.